Re: [Bodington-developers] Top frame styling improvement - commited to HEAD

[Jon M. <jo...@te...>]

Colin Tatham wrote:
> Yes, but not very thoroughly. (I was wanting to check that the default view I was seeing was 
> intentional, it looked odd to me, and I have had problems in the past where either Firefox or Tomcat 
> was preventing me seeing the effects of changes to template/css files...)
>   
Caching of CSS files in browsers is really really bad news.  In Firefox, 
if you reload a page the CSS files referenced within frames are NOT 
reloaded. To test my edits I had to type the URL of the top frame into 
the location box - reloading that properly reloaded the CSS files.   I'm 
not sure about I.E. but it seems worse than Firefox most of the time.

The mechanism for handling dynamic CSS files in Bodington goes to great 
lengths to make sure that all browsers implement changes immediately 
while maintaining the performance advantages. The virtual CSS file that 
is directly referenced by the HTML is nearly empty - it just includes 
the actual CSS files. This tiny CSS file is delivered with headers that 
prevent any kind of caching so that any changes made to it are instantly 
applied but the size is so small that the lack of caching doesn't slow 
things down.  The proper virtual CSS files are sent with headers that 
encourage caching.  If the CSS needs to change the URL also changes and 
the include instructions in the master CSS change.  Since the URLs have 
not been seen before the browser is forced to load them and apply them.

Jon